Tired but Happy part 1

Tonight, I realized that it's been two weeks since I started this, and I haven't added anything else to it. Not exactly what I had anticipated! Maybe I had to let it digest a bit first. There's the "good" side, and the "bad" side to this.

I think my life is at some kind of crossroads. On the one hand, my day to day life has gotten much fuller, which is the "good" side. On the whole, my daily life, except for a brief spurt between April and July, has been pretty solitary outside of work. Some of that has been of my own doing, a sort of "personal time" away from the noise and haste. But, a lot of it has been not of my own doing, but more a factor of location. I've always told myself, before I lived here, that I could be happy wherever I was, because happiness comes from within, but also, one can decide to be happy and find the things and places that contribute to that in their environment. However, this notion really got tested once I moved to this area about 16 years ago. Maybe it was partly my own expectations, or partly it was my lack of knowledge about the realities and actualities of the ability of culture to shape one's experience, especially if one has not been any other place to experience any other culture other than one's own. I guess to put it bluntly, it was like, "When Worlds Collide", except not in the global, sci-fi sense, but in the real life, conversational, interactional way, which actually tends to seep down deeper and begins to affect the soul when you find that suddenly, you are the "different" one, instead of the one that tends to blend in to the surroundings, or at least, has much common ground with the other natives in the local village. It still amazes me that we can call ourselves one country, the United States, and yet, life can be vastly different in almost every way from one state to the next, or even one area of 200 miles or so in any one direction. Basically, after not such a long time being here, to steal from another movie, I realized, "Toto, we're not in Kansas anymore......". And, I missed my version of Kansas very much. Maybe because, more like the opposite of the movie, it felt like my Kansas(California) had gone from the wonderful colors of Oz back to a black and white tornado-infested Kansas, otherwise known as Wisconsin.

At first, I tried shaking it off; "I can do this. I've got the skills, I've got the desire, this is my new home, I'm making a go of it". Then, I'd tromp off to make my world more colorful. The only difficulty that I hadn't factored into my nice theory was that, unlike me, the other natives of the village didn't really want to live in color; they rather liked their black and white existence, and, in fact, thought it was full of color! I think, for the longest time, I worked really, really hard to try to "see" the colors they saw, but, to my chagrin, it never seemed real to me, just still black and white with shades of gray. Oh, and the other thing was that these people seemed to also live in a rather 2-D world, when I was used to 3-D. That takes a bit of getting used to, also; in fact, I've found myself off kilter more than a few times, trying to re-adjust my sights and "fit in" to the new land I inhabited. But, it wasn't very comfortable, and I grew tired of always feeling off kilter, wondering how these others thought this to feel so "normal" in their world. I felt like a hexagon that was trying to adjust myself to fit into a square box. It gets a little cramped after awhile. And, trying to explain a world in 3D when the natives only see 2D gets to be a bit trying after awhile, especially after getting the same kind of faraway look that says, "I have no idea what you're talking about." So, slowly, I began to pull away from the crowd, and find a way to feel more comfortable. And, the funny thing is, I suddenly found myself spending lots more time by myself, which of itself wasn't a bad thing, but, over time, I did start to feel as if I were really quite an uncommon kind among these parts, and I'd have to search beyond this village to find some like minded folk.

Due to technical difficulties, this message is being delayed until further notice. (Editing: This is taking longer than I thought, so I will finish this up tomorrow). :-)

Same bat time, same bat channel.